I can not remember when I started reading or why. If it is true that children ape their parents, then it is natural that I did. My father was to be always found with a book – whether at lunch, or in the moments he had snatched from the day for himself. All he wanted on Sunday afternoons was to be stretched out on the comfortable arm-chair with a book, with no one talking to him. Do you have any idea how difficult it is for little girls to leave their father alone on a Sunday afternoon? We got unceremoniously shooed off if we persisted in bothering him.

Our old ancestral home where I grew up was overflowing with books – books amassed by generations of Pendharkars that had lived there, starting from my Great Grandfather. There have been ardent readers in my family for generations and they all seemed to have believed in buying a lot of books. In that era, it was common to send your kids to the big town for higher education and more often than not, if there were relatives in the big town, that’s where they stayed. A multitude of my Grandfather’s and father’s cousins have called the place their home at some time or another and have enriched it by leaving behind books that they could not carry away. And because the contributors were so varied and so many, the collection contains books of an astounding variety. Continue reading →

Are you all wondering what happened to Rashmi? Why is she keeping us away from all the scrumptious goodness in her life. Surely, even if the posts have gotten infrequent, the eating can’t have, can it?

And you are absolutely right, it can’t. And it hasn’t. I’m one of those crazy people who can not give up good food. Indeed, a good part of my day is spent on food related activities – when I’m not eating or cooking, I’m reading, talking or even simply dreaming about food. I spend hours and hours drooling over food photographs. Watching Food Network is even more engrossing. Tanmoy says it is more entertaining to watch me watching cookery shows than the shows themselves, because I look like a greedy pig feasting (alas only visually) on a variety of foods far beyond its little piggy imagination and sometimes there’s even a maniacal glint in my eye. The situation, in short, is getting quite out of hand. Continue reading →

Like this:

It was Tanmoy’s birthday last week, so I was in a celebratory mood. After all, his birthday means that for the next 11 months, we can both quote the same age when asked (yes, I am whole month older than him… GASP!) Just to be contrary, he was in as non-celebratory a mood as anyone could possibly be for their own birthday. So I was having a tough time figuring out how to celebrate without really celebrating.

My Ma-in-law made the decision making slightly easier by saying I should make Payesh (a lip-smacking-spoon-licking-inducing rice pudding very well liked by the Bengalis and indeed by anyone who ever gets to eat it). Then Tanmoy asked for a Strawberry Cake (and warned me not to tell anyone because sweet pink cakes are for little girls but I am telling anyway because I think everyone has a right to like pink cakes), so the sweets were take care of. But I still needed to figure out what the main dish would be – it had to special and sumptuous, something that would warm your belly and make you smile for sometime after you’d finished eating, something that inherently made you feel good about being alive, something that would make even a husband in the most non-celebratory mood (silently) thank his stars that his wife was of a different opinion.

After rejecting many recipes already in my repertoire (I wasn’t experimenting for this occassion) I suddenly remembered this one. Continue reading →